We raise children, heads up, to fall
in love, but some raise the dead
who can’t tell difference between winks and blinks,
and catcalls to car crashes and ambulance whistles.

We raise the pleasant but pale into long loneliness,
delicately delighting damnation behind the blinds,
living below life’s limits. Maintaining mediocrity,
manly or womanly, chin highly.

Some raise children to hide in clouds from all below,
thinking shadows are those things that don’t follow:
Love can leave ourselves behind, capturing passion
doesn’t show on a slow-dried oil painting in sonnets.

It’s only gripped by holding hands, not by hiding who
you are from confrontation’s questions. Who made you?
What are you? You are the who sits in solitude and
practices acceptance with fists and fiction.

Alone, loving the love song we sing to ourselves
after accidentally hearing composed commodities
never to leave our heads after seconds of unchosen
musical interaction, until a flat EKG sings us off

to gnats up the nose, ant eggs in ears.
We dare to love the dandelions
that don’t roar, but their beauty destroys
concrete as teeth in thin antelope thighs.

We raise children to keep heads up, grazing,
living by ignoring the watering hole
so they do not look down into earth
and see themselves: what’s coming for them.